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0 pointscoldtea10y ago0 comments

>Mathematica is a proprietary software

Nothing wrong with that.

>influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied).

Not much wrong with that either.

Even if it was just a clone of those systems when it came out, being the successful clone is enough to make it have merit.

But of course since then it's 1000 times the code size of the initial systems, and 100 times the capabilities.

>It would be the same to defend William Henry "Bill" Gates III, by stating that MS-DOS is significant, while MS-DOS was a renamed form of 86-DOS

Again, MS-DOS is significant. Whether it was innovative (it wasn't) is another thing, but it sure has been historically significant.

Sorry, but it's not always the first product that comes out that defines an era and a market. And copying happens all the time too, and can even evolve into something that the original never was.

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Chris204810y ago

It may be that if the clone didn't exist, the attention might have instead fallen upon it's predecessors, with the benefit of them being non-propriety. Being a successful clone does not imply merit, in fact "forks" can do damage...

jordigh10y ago

> Nothing wrong with that.

Much wrong with that. Mathematics should not proceed based on a secret sauce. In mathematics, the details of the computation are almost always far more interesting than the result. The details are the very raison d'être of the subject.

coldteaOP10y ago

>Mathematics should not proceed based on a secret sauce.

Thanks god Mathematica is not mathematics the science, then, but just a tool in assisting with doing math and physics and all kinds of calculations.

>*In mathematics, the details of the computation are almost always far more interesting than the result.

Yeah, just not in any case Mathematica, Maple, R, Matlab etc were involved.

Create10y ago

The issue is misattributions and misappropriations. And those should be (and are) wrong, esp. in science.

Taking the spirit of the times, ie. migrating software from minis to micros/pc^1-s in both cases and expropriating and monopolizing is not about simply copying, nor evolution in the best sense.

^1 https://xkcd.com/386/

scholia10y ago

(1) "There Was a Time before Mathematica…"

Wolfram's blog post says he discovered "a program called Macsyma — that did algebra, and could be used interactively. I was amazed so few people used it. But it wasn’t long before I was spending most of my days on it."

Later: "I got more and more ambitious, trying to do more and more with Macsyma. Pretty soon I think I was its largest user. But sometime in 1979 I hit the edge; I’d outgrown it."

Later: "And after a little while I decided that the only way I’d really have a chance to get what I wanted was if I built it myself. And so it was that I embarked on what would become SMP (the “Symbolic Manipulation Program”)."

Mathematica came after SMP.

Sounds like a fairly familiar software story, no?

(1) http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time-befo...

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